Enlisting Game Hackers Instead of Fighting Them

CVG recently spoke with Christofer Sundberg, co-founder of Avalanche Studios, the company behind Just Cause and its sequel. Sundberg expressed his disdain for both DRM and poor cross-platform ports, and talked about how he sees the hacker community as more of an ally than publishers do. Quoting: "'... 50 percent of the people that work for me come from a hacker background - that's true.' When asked whether approaching leading hackers and asking them to put their programming skills to good use was a wise idea, Sundberg added: 'Oh yeah. I absolutely think that's a fair approach, to think about how these people can fit on the right side of the law. It's one way, at least. Perhaps the truest pirates are too much down the road of anarchy to ever work with you in a proper way; these are the guys who see us as evil! But in Sweden the [hacking] scene was huge... As a studio, we've found that there's definitely a lot of talent [in that community].'"

Comments

Semantics, hackers, crackers and coders

[Sentry23]

I wonder how much of his coders come from the cracking scene, and how much from the demo-scene.
The cracking scene has always had some ties with the demo scene (and in some cases demo groups where the 'legal-branch' of some hacking groups) but cracking PC games does not bring much skill for game coding. (or is x86 assembly code really such a special skill these days?)

Re:Are "hackers/crackers" good or better programme

[nbetcher]

I have a co-worker who is absolutely enamored with hacking and cracking. He is by all definitions a script kiddie.

You pretty much answered your own question: he is a script kiddie, not a hacker or cracker. Hackers are elegant and, in my experience, have a higher sense of intelligence and thought process. That's often the divide for people who go to school to earn their degree in computer science and the ones that are successful programmers without going to school to earn their degree; the formally educated feel like they deserve some bonus credit because they blew tens of thousands of dollars getting a piece of paper. Don't get me wrong, going the degree route is the smarter choice overall, but it certainly doesn't give merit to your skills. In fact, I'd probably hire a seasoned hacker over someone with less than 10 years of school-earned programming experience.